The Orchard - Post Acute Care

This facility's overall grade was propped up by the fact that it has received favorable inspections in recent years. We gave them a strong score in that area, with a B+. This is a much better score than the facility's overall score. Inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. Nursing grades are mostly associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Additionally, we also wanted to note that this nursing home was given strong long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that category, with a grade of B. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we looked at is short-term care. This facility was awarded a grade of C in this category. With our short-term care rating, we seek to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 4.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.